Our Favorite Political and Legal Thrillers This Year

Matthew Keating, a one-time Navy SEAL—and a past president—has always defended his family as staunchly as he has his country. Now those defenses are under attack.
A madman abducts Keating’s teenage daughter, Melanie—turning every parent’s deepest fear into a matter of national security. As the world watches in real time, Keating embarks on a one-man special-ops mission that tests his strengths: as a leader, a warrior, and a father.

Detective Billy Harney has seen some of the roughest cases working on the Chicago PD, and he knows what it's like when a case turns political. So his suspicions are raised when a drive-by shooting is rushed through and begins questioning everyone's assumptions about the case. When he finds evidence that hints at more victims than just the obvious ones on file, his unofficial investigation uncovers corruption and deceit that leads to the top of the city.

Related: Our James Patterson Summer Roundup 

In 2008, a cheerful ambulance-chasing lawyer named Jay Shenk persuades the grieving Keener family to sue a private LA hospital. Their son Wesley has been transformed by a routine surgery into a kind of golem, absent all normal functioning or personality, walking in endless empty circles around his hospital room.  In 2019, Shenk—still in practice but a shell of his former self—is hired to defend Wesley Keener’s father when he is charged with murder . . . the murder, as it turns out, of the expert witness from the 2008 hospital case. Shenk’s adopted son, a fragile teenager in 2008, is a wayward adult, though he may find his purpose when he investigates what really happened to the murdered witness.